Insurance & Investment
Strategy
Our strategy is to be the UK’s leading insurance and investment group. We have ambitions to grow our market share in all sectors in which we operate, but our emphasis is on profitable growth. Our strategy reflects the core strengths of our existing multi-channel, multi-brand operating model, leveraging the strength of the Group’s brands and our access to the significant HBOS customer base, but also further extending our presence in third party channels.
Key objectives in support of this strategy include:
Growing our market share of personal lines insurance
Leveraging our market-leading position in mortgages, we are targeting growth in household insurance through the development of our product propositions and brand offerings. There are significant growth opportunities through the Group’s Retail branch network but also through intermediaries. We will leverage the Group’s strengths and expertise in both channels, whilst also targeting growth through telephone, internet sales, third party arrangements and joint ventures. We will utilise the strength of the esure and Sheilas’ Wheels brands to grow our motor insurance business. We will maintain a leading position in the repayment insurance market, continuing to enhance our customer offering to support growth in both first and third party channels.
Delivering value generating growth in Life, Pensions and Investments (‘LP&I’) market
We will continue to develop our market-leading Bancassurance business, offering our customers simple, value for money products, while increasing adviser numbers and investing in technology to drive further productivity improvements. In the Intermediary channel, where returns are less strong, our focus is on optimising the value generated by selecting the product areas and intermediary segments which offer the most attractive returns. SJP will continue to target growth through its unique business model in the growing Wealth Management market, with a dual focus on improving productivity and on recruiting top quality partners.
Driving customer satisfaction and retention through the delivery of service excellence
Service excellence will continue to be critical to our business model. We are investing in technology to maximise process efficiency, with an increasing emphasis on straight through electronic processing to reduce rework and errors. We will continue our focus on the recruitment, training and retention of quality colleagues who will provide service excellence and drive advocacy of our products.
At the same time, we will continue to focus on controlling claims costs through faster handling and settlement of claims, improved fraud detection mechanisms and technologies, and effective procurement and supplier management.
Maintaining rigorous cost control disciplines
Cost efficient growth is at the heart of our strategy. We will seek to maximise efficiency in our new business processing, existing business administration, claims handling and customer service, whilst investing in growing the business with supporting technology and process improvements.
Increasing capital efficiency
We have an increasingly capital efficient product mix in both General Insurance and Investment, having chosen not to actively market and underwrite products which are more capital intensive such as with profits bonds, annuities and long tail general insurance policies.